The B.C. government plans to spend $4.6 million to repair Robson Square's reflecting ponds in time for the 2010 Olympics.
Oy...
Have you been anywhere near Robson Square in the last 10 years?
Planning to be there soon?
Is Robson Square at all on your radar?
The King Of Priorities strikes again.
General Motors, Driven to the Brink
Now, there's a headline.
Not too long ago, the SUV was the biggest single profit centre a car company ever had.
It is now, thank god, toast.
"What is clear is that Detroit, among its other miscues in recent years, particularly overindulged its romance with S.U.V.’s, leaving it tethered to a product line that may prove to be the industry’s undoing."
Read the whole story here and then bless your Smart Car, scooter or 2-door hatchback and keep lobbying for real transit in Vancouver.
Who knows?
Maybe someday it will arrive.
Frank Rich of the NY Times has written a fascinating editorial this morning on the self-destruction of the McCain campaign.
He says, among other things, that "Republican leaders have no idea what “real America” is."
The piece is called "In Defense of White Americans," and it's definitely a good read.
O.K.
I've read my customary quota of newspapers.
Nothing. Zilch. Gornicht. Nyet. Cropotkin. Zero, bubula.
So, as a change-up...
Of late, I've been playing a lot of Six Degrees of Separation.
This is the mindless, time-wasting and way fun game of thinking how close you've come to serious celebrity.
Now, because of my years in broadcasting, I have already met some very interesting folk:
FEATURED INTERVIEWS
Oscar Winners Oscar Nominees Tony Winner | Emmy Winners Law & Order's |
The Best of the Rest
Joey Bishop | Paul Mercer Ellington |
Prime Ministers
Premiers
And 1001 MP's, MLA's, social workers, mothers, doctors, lawyers and Indian Chiefs; Drug addicts, murderers, scoundrels and saints.
On public policy, education, health, justice, sports, food, sex, and rock 'n roll...
| Other Nominees: | |
- This was James Dean's second consecutive posthumous nomination. | |
The Vancouver Sun has been polling candidates for municipal office.
Several findings were encouraging.
Under the heading "Religion," 28.3% refused to answer.
As they all should. I don't want to know about your religion. IN fact, I really, really don't want to know.
I want to know about your stand on matters of public policy.
Under the heading of "Ethnicity," 12.2% refused to answer.
As everyone should.
I don't want to know about your "ethnicity."
I want to know about your stand on matters of public policy.
And under the heading "Immigrant," with a choice of No or Yes (in that peculiar order), 5.6% refused to answer.
As everyone should.
I don't want to know if you are someone called "an immigrant."
I want to know your stand on matters of public policy.
The photograph, by the way, is of Jeff Kuah, one of the 13 other candidates for Mayor of the City of Vancouver.
To the Gulf Island Driftwood,
Prime Minister Stephen Harper,
Victoria Times Colonist
CBC Television
David Berner’s Blog
I have just finished watching the CBC documentary of the upcoming trial of Omar Khadr, a child soldier and Canadian citizen, who is to be prosecuted by the U.S. Army Justice Department at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in November for an incident that occurred when he was 15 years old.
It is obvious from the details presented that the US Army has a vested interest in the outcome of this trial. These details include evidence of torture during interrogation, as well as re-writing the reports of US officers who were present at the incident in Afghanistan. In View of this, it is blatantly obvious that in this case, US Army justice is no justice at all. But what is astounding to me is the fact that in six years the Canadian government has not intervened on behalf of this underage Canadian citizen. In fact, our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has allowed this travesty of justice to proceed contrary to the actions of all other foreign governments in similar circumstances. The only Canadian contact I can confirm was a taped interview with Khadr by two unnamed Canadians, the outcome of which obviously did nothing but increase the accused’s feelings of hopelessness.
In conclusion, I believe this is a shameful precedent that could put all Canadians abroad in jeopardy. I hope it is not too late to take remedial action!
Sincerely,
A.G. Geoff Cue
480 Vesuvius Bay Road
Salt Spring Island, B.C. V8K 1K7
Proof positive that Barbara Yappy has lost any marble that she have had on loan is her argument today that McCain is good for Canada because he favors NAFTA.
Somehow, she has missed the main issue.
Is McCain good for the world?
And the simple answer is "No."
Obama may not be the second coming of the messiah or anything remotely close, but he is superior candidate at this time in this place.
Barbara, read a book. Read more papers. Walk the dog. Go deeper.
To the Editor - Re: 'Accelerate financial relief with those billions.'
Small Businesses will lead Canada's recovery, according a recent CIBC
report.
I guess we, the small businesses, can only lead our province and country's
recovery -
if our government doesn't succeed in ploughing us under when they build
public infrastructure projects.
October is Small Business Month in BC.
Campbell has his legacy on his mind. So do we.
Ours has been de-railed, and all our efforts to build a sturdy financial
future have been expropriated so that our Gordfather can pad his resume.
The Small Business Minister Kevin Krueger spent half an hour at the Board of
Trade this week praising our sector as essential to the economic well-being
of our Province. Unless of course, you get in the way of profits for
government projects. They are setting a precedent with this secretive Canada
Line project, that Governments can destroy your life's work at will. This is
outrageous.
There's all kinds of Campbell cash available to top up Canada Line's tank -
even when they gamble and lose our tax dollars in such careless investments
as the sub-prime mortgage market - there's Campbell with another $56 million
to bail out and prop up Canada Line.
Where is the support - where is the propping up of the very group who have
filled the Provincial coffers with billions in tax revenue for years and
years?
On the Train to Nowhere.
Enough is enough.
The baskets and banners and pretty sidewalks through the Cambie Village will
do nothing to restore the livelihoods of all who have been forced into
bankruptcy by this project.
Compensation is deserved, and long overdue. There is nothing to celebrate
until this is rectified.
Susan Heyes
HAZEL&CO
3190 Cambie St
604 687-0721
Pardon me while I gloat.
Yesterday I posted Margaret Kopala's editorial from the Ottawa Citizen in defense of the RCMP's stance against Insite.
Today, the Sun published the same piece.
Then, pardon me, while I cry.
Monday's post called "Taxi!" is all about the failure of the local transit system.
It has generated 15 comments to date, which may be a record for this blog.
The posting and especially the comments are very much worth a read.
Ross Howard is an award-winning journalist, a marvelous intructor at Langara College, and a good friend. He spends considerable time in Africa and other remote regions teaching journalism. The following is an email he sent earlier today. (Tuesday, October 21/08)
David: while I agree with your excoriations of The Sun's latest putative improvements, I think in your criticisms and polling you have to sharpen the audience's understanding of what appears to be going on.
The Sun is not sacrificing local news and god forbid, enterprise reporting because the newsroom is populated with wholly incompetent reporters and idiot editors. Left to their own and professional instincts they would generally prefer to be doing more, better work.
However, the latest redesign yet again appears to reflect a corporate imperative to maximize profit by spending the least possible on content improvements as opposed to cosmetic rearrangements of limp content.
In some ways its not fair to beat up on journalists. They don't run newspaper anymore, in many cases (especially most big dailies.) .
Bean-counters, accountants, media corporation managers are the ones dictating the underlying impetus for such changes, which is to treat news production as a profit centre, not as a public service.
Within a generation, perhaps within five years, even in Canada where the newspaper crisis is different, weak papers like The Sun risk a real collapse in their readership numbers (old habits eventually die, young ones go online) because of the irrelevancy of the paper edition as useful (aside from reassuring status quo ideas) to readers young and old. Belatedly then the corporate directives may encourage the remaining Sun journalists to rediscover relevance and perhaps modestly invest in the pursuit, but it may be too late.
To belabour my point: it isn't journalists who are killing the print media in Canada. It is the owners.
Ross Howard
O.K.
I get it.
It took a while, cause I'm not too swift, eh?
But now I got it.
The Sun's new page design means that we will be blessed with a columnist taking up the bottom half of the front page.
I'm guessing that this means they think they are competing with or getting in synch with blogs.
They think we rush to read other people's opinions.
Surprise!
Some of us like to read this odd thing called THE NEWS.
There are only a few oddities about the case of David Shearing that need be noted.
Shearing killed six people, but he was convicted in each count of second degree murder.
Which should open a twelve hour discussion about what constitutes pre-meditation.
In this case, I suppose someone argued, or the judge istructed, that the accused seized an opportunity, rather than planned anything, as he apparently came across these two families camping and then destroyed them all.
A fine point no doubt.
So what are the time limits for pre-meditation? You have to devise your murders months - or minutes - in advance to qualify for first degree murder?
Then, there is this small oddity.
Shearing has been in prison for many years now, but in 1995 he married a lady from Prince Albert. Her name is Heather. You cannot write material like this.
And finally, the parole board must now go through the charade of considering this nut job for various of their forms of freedoms.
Let us all pray together. We know about the efficacies of the parole board.
Published: Monday, October 20, 2008
The RCMP has its problems but nothing justifies cowering before special interest groups. This time, it's E Division that's under fire from the Pivot Legal Society in a Vancouver battleground where electoral politics has nothing on the politics of supervised drug injection.
The Downtown Eastside's Insite is on the brink of becoming Canada's worst public policy disaster, yet last week the Pivot Legal Society called for Canada's auditor general to investigate the RCMP's authority to commission research into the facility's effects on crime and associated issues.
The problem? First -- and despite the information being available on one website over a year ago -- Pivot alleges the research was "secretly" commissioned; secondly, though two reports were favourable to Insite, two were critical: one by Garth Davies, a professor at Simon Fraser University and the other, the now seminal analysis titled A Critique of Canada's INSITE Injection Site and its Parent Philosophy.
Written by Dr. Colin Mangham, a veteran of nearly 30 years in substance abuse prevention and a former professor of health education at Dalhousie University, the critique painstakingly questions studies suggesting Insite either saves lives, reduces crime and disease transmission, or encourages treatment. It also exposes the facility's parent philosophy that drugs are a lifestyle choice, a premise whose ethical contradictions can only be resolved by legalizing drugs or, as the city of Oslo recently determined, by closing its injection facility.
Dr. Mangham confirmed to me this week that nothing in his paper has been disproved or even specifically challenged. Instead, and given its status as the new four-letter word, it is being dismissed as "ideologically" biased though as someone once observed, name-calling is the last refuge of the intellectually bankrupt.
It's not the first time. Like Davies and Mangham, Health Canada's panel of experts summarized first the studies' positive findings then their methodological and design flaws. Among many qualifications to the studies' assertions, the panel noted how only five per cent of drug addicts in the area were using the facility and of those, only 20 per cent on a regular basis.
Its report was promptly dismissed as "political."
And when addiction treatment specialist Dr. Donald Hedges attempted to appear before a parliamentary committee to argue Insite is encouraging risky behaviour (the heroin addict needs progressively higher highs), he was harrassed and intimidated by demonstrators.
Thug democracy rules and now it's the RCMP. Never mind the quality of the work, just question the right of a beleaguered institution to undertake it. To make matters really interesting, point to derogatory remarks coined by a retired constable about the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/Aids which nonetheless powerfully symbolize the deep chasm between the epidemiologists who dominate Insite scholarship and officers who must work in an area which after five years of Insite remains an open-air lavatory. Literally.
Let's be clear. All experts, however narrow their disciplines, have important contributions to make. Those with experience in the field are no less important than those in academe. But there is good reason why neither should dictate public policy which must save lives, reconcile competing interests and address complex issues. Only the citizenry through its elected representatives can do this.
Still, if the Pivot Legal Society wishes to involve the auditor general, so be it. Transparency is always a good thing. And while she's at it, why not open the books of all the service organizations in the Downtown Eastside. Why not reveal the names of board members, peer reviewers, their fees and salaries, spousal relationships, political connections and who, in what government department, motivated by what rationale, is authorizing payment for all this.
Better still, why not just concentrate on ending drug use and addiction.
As the RCMP begins its internal review into this matter, let E Division stand tall for its own area of expertise. Since access to drugs is the biggest challenge to recovery from addiction, no treatment or prevention agenda is possible without a law and order agenda. Sweden's zero-tolerance model and mandatory treatment for addicted repeat offenders should also be considered.
Margret Kopala's column on western perspectives appears every other week.
Mysteriously, inexplicably, the local transit system, hated and feared by all who use it regularly, keeps winning international awards.
Clearly the juries who give out these prizes have not been talking to the drivers.
"The overcrowding, the delays, the pass-ups, the inadequate service. It's gone on for years."
This a quote from the local union president, Don MacLeod, calling for many, many more buses.
Will Transclunk or Coast Mountain Bus or whoever is claiming to run the show these days hear this plea?
Or will people trying to get home from a day's work still wait for 30 minutes in the cold and dark and rain?
It is likely - and to be hoped - that Stephane Dion steps down today.
Not that there are so many shining lights waiting in the wings. But surely, Dion was one of the weakest leaders the Liberal party have ever put forward.
Dan Gardner, writing in today's Sun, has an interesting analysis that is worth the read.
I don't know that I will ever be persuaded that carbon taxes make any sense, but Gardner makes a good argument for the idea and how Dion missed his main chance.
